About Me

Friday, February 27, 2009

I know you are all shocked by this title. "A Mexican cleaning woman?" What the hell kind of nonsense is he talking about? We had one though as this story is true.When I was in college, we had a team of housekeepers who were responsible for cleaning the common areas in our dormitory. When I first got there, we had one guy named Paul and he was good. The guys on our floor had a good relationship with Paul. He did a good job and didn't complain about cleaning up after college kids. For our part, we did not mention how this guy was like 50 years old and cleaned college dorms for a living. It all worked well.Our world was rocked one day when we were told that Paul had quit. He was being replaced with a Mexican cleaning woman. I did not know her name. I just knew her as the new Mexican cleaning woman. To show my naivety at the time, I did not realize that there were different types of Mexican cleaning woman like Guatemalans and Puerto Ricans, for example.

On my floor we had one bathroom which had 3 showers. This was shared by about 25 people so there were people taking showers frequently. This meant that the MCW would almost always have to clean the bathroom while someone was in there showering.

It was all ok though. There was a curtain on the shower stall and then there was a private drying off area and another curtain to get into that. She could come in and clean the toilets and sinks and not be directly exposed to naked college guys. If she heard someone taking a shower, she would avoid the shower area until they were gone.

The Mexican cleaning woman had a special trick that she used to like to pull. When a guy was in the drying off area, she would pull the curtain aside and then act surprised when she saw someone there.

At first we thought it was all perfectly innocent. A few of us discussed this and decided it was happening far too frequently to be so innocent. I would try coughing when I knew she was in there, just to alert her that there was someone behind the curtain. It didn’t matter though, she would still “accidently” open the curtain to clean the shower. (In retrospect, I don’t know why it never occurred to me to just yell to her that I was in there, but it didn’t.) By the time we would be in there sounding like tuberculosis patients and were still being walked in on, we realized it was not a mistake on her part.

After considering whether or not to turn her in, I decided to let it slide. I did not care that much and I figured if it gave the MCL some small thing (and I mean that figuratively) to look forward to when she came to work, it was the least I could do.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

I know you are all shocked by this title. "A Mexican cleaning woman?" What the hell kind of nonsense is he talking about? We had one though as this story is true.

When I was in college, we had a team of housekeepers who were responsible for cleaning the common areas in our dormitory. When I first got there, we had one guy named Paul and he was good. The guys on our floor had a good relationship with Paul. He did a good job and didn't complain about cleaning up after college kids. For our part, we did not mention how this guy was like 50 years old and cleaned college dorms for a living. It all worked well.

Our world was rocked one day when we were told that Paul had quit. He was being replaced with a Mexican cleaning woman. I did not know her name. I just knew her as the new Mexican cleaning woman. To show my naivity at the time, I did not realize that there were different types of Mexican cleaning woman like Guatemalans and Puerto Ricans, for example.

...I am so disappointed. The second half of this story was lost when I tried to publish it. I will try to finish it later.